March 08, 2008 01:54 AM UTC

Republicans Using Congressional Resources to Try to Hold Hastert's Seat

• 6 Comments
• by: DavidThi808

This is taken verbatum from DailyKOS

The Republicans are doing whatever they can to hold on to Dennis Hastert’s seat…including breaking House Rules by sending emails over the Congressional email network to Ohio staffers asking them to send their Congressional interns to phone bank for Republican Jim Oberweis:

From: Lillibridge, Matthew

To: [redacted]@mail.house.gov; [redacted]@voinovich.senate.gov; [redacted]@brown.senate.gov; [other names redacted]

Sent: Fri Mar 07 13:04:29 2008

Subject: FW: Phone banking

Matthew J. Lillibridge

Congressman Steve Chabot (OH-01)

129 Cannon House Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20515

Phone: (202) 225-2216

Fax: (202) 225-3012

To sign up for Congressman Chabot’s Newsletter, Click Here http://www.house.gov/…

—–Original Message—–

From: [redacted]

Sent: Friday, March 07, 2008 12:12 PM

To: Lillibridge, Matthew; [other names redacted]

Subject: Phone banking

A last minute plea, if you have interns sitting around today, please send them over to the RNC room B2 to phone bank for Oberweis in IL-14.  Staff, etc. will be making calls all day up until 9 tonight.  The phone bank will open tommorrow (Election day) at 9am and end at 7pm.

Feel free to forward to friends on the Hill etc.

Matthew Lillibridge does in fact work for Republican Steve Chabot (OH-01).  He sent this email to individuals who work for members of the Ohio delegation; it was eventually forwarded to us.  As they did nothing wrong by simply receiving the email, we’ve redacted the names of the recipients, although we did confirm that they have been employed by Congress through searches on a public database of Congressional employees.

Using Congressional resources for electioneering is strictly prohibited.  It’s one of the first things every Congressional staffer is told upon employment on Capitol Hill.  If your personal cell phone rings and it’s about a campaign matter, according to House ethics rules you’re not supposed to even talk about campaign matters if you’re standing in a House office building.  Thus, it’s a common sight to see staffers on the sidewalk outside the various House buildings on their cell phones.  

There’s also the question of whether interns are being asked to do campaign work when they should be doing official Congressional work.  It is against House ethics rules to coerce any employee to do campaign work.  

Whatever the case regarding the interns, using the Congressional email system for campaign activity is against House rules.  Period.